Assassins of Liberty

The assassination of Anwar
al-Awlaki sets the kind of precedent that Americans will come to regret,
but for now they cheer, like Romans hailing a death in the arena. Richard
Miniter, writing in the Obamaite – and aptly named – Daily Beast,
avers that not only was the killing legal, it was also “wise.” He
writes:

“President Obama’s targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and
died in Yemen fighting for al Qaeda, is a victory for America and for
common sense.”

As if our all-wise and all-powerful
President personally stalked and killed his prey, mano a mano.
Obama is “like Lincoln,” says Miniter, who ordered the deaths of
his fellow Americans in a vicious civil war – but a more accurate analogy
is, perhaps, the Roman emperor Commodus, who personally fought in gladiatorial
contests, and, as Wikipedia relates, “For each appearance in the arena,
he charged the city of Rome a million sesterces, straining the Roman economy.”

According to the US government,
al-Awlaki was murdered because he “inspired” others to attack the
United States through his preaching over the internet. He was also supposedly personally involved in planning the activities of the “underwear
bomber.” No evidence of his guilt has ever been released: it’s all
secret, along with the list of individuals marked for death by US authorities.

Yet this alleged “terrorist”
wasn’t always so notorious: indeed, right after the 9/11 attacks he
was summoned to Capitol Hill to lead a prayer vigil for Muslim congressional
staffers, and was invited to the Pentagon to lecture on Islam. The idea
was to find a “moderate” Muslim, who was “vetted” by the authorities,
to “reach out” to the Muslim community, Fox News reports.
The event was reportedly a luncheon, during which al-Awlaki denounced
al-Qaeda, and, although “harassed” by audience members, “handled
it well,” according to one eyewitness.

The trail
of the “terrorist” imam leads us to the 9/11 hijackers, two of whom
were devoted communicants of al-Awlaki’s San Diego mosque. So great
was their devotion that they followed him to Falls Church, Virginia,
when the imam took up his duties at a local mosque. He had also been
investigated as early as 1999 for links to bin Laden’s organization.
So why was al-Awlaki invited to the Pentagon?

We will never know the answer
to that question, but what we do know is this: his phone number was
found by German police in the possession of one of the hijackers, and
the FBI tried to set him up with a prostitution bust, but backed off.
Somehow he managed to get out of the country and flee to Yemen before
the feds could get their hands on him – and there the murky trail
of the “terrorist” imam drops off into the abyss….

The dreaded “conspiracy theorists”
are going to have a field day with the al-Awlaki killing: they’re
already headlining “Pentagon Asset Anwar al-Awlaki Killed in Yemen.”
I’ll let them have their fun, and simply note that, in Washington,
as in ancient Rome, one can quickly lose favor, and find oneself at
the business end of a javelin – or a drone. It all depends on the
whims of the Emperor President, who may embrace
you one day and sentence you to death the next. Caprice is the chief
operating principle of our “wise” rulers.

The assassination of Anwar
al-Awlaki sets an important precedent, one that will go down in our
history as a shameful moment, a turning point, when the policy of endless
war empowered the President to kill his own countrymen without benefit
of trial. Any American, whose “preaching” purportedly “inspires”
a terrorist act is now fair game for our Praetorians. The first time
we take out an American citizen on American soil, on the mere suspicion
that he may be a “terrorist,” our legal eagles will point to the
al-Awlaki case as justification. That a citizen of this country may
be put on a list that marks him for death, without public trial, seals
the doom of our old republic. Obama’s partisans hail his great “victory,”
while their neoconservative rivals do the same – and there is no one
left to wonder what has happened to the Constitution.

As America enters a period
of travail, when the prospect of economic and civil turmoil becomes
all too real, this precedent is terrifying. That the President may order
the death of an American without due process of law means that the concept
of law is no longer operative: it signals the end of the America we
knew, and loved, and the beginning of … something else.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo